Tag Archives: community

Outside, the summer rain falls, cool, clean, and sweet. Inside, the air is warm and sweaty, filled with Scottish reel music. I am at a large contra dance, dancing with a stranger. He is tall and his hands are steady as he spins me. Even though my hands are tiny in his large palms, we keep a tension between us that is balanced and supple as we bounce through the Highland Schottische. The dance is spirited with lots of spins and Celtic kicks, but it still retains its Bohemian roots in its stylized patty-cake section. I’m enjoying my time with my partner. It is rare that I find someone who matches my steps and anticipates my body movements so well. But, we link arms and spin each other one last time. We exchange smiles, happy that the afternoon has only started. We shall be seeking each other out for another set. Then I look forward, reaching out both of my arms, palms out, to my next partner. The band is only finishing the first cycle of the tune, I will dance with at least ten more people before the song is over.

I love a good contra dance. It combines a few of my favorite things: traditional United Kingdom music, exercise, spinning, and geometry. I especially love the Highland Schottishe, a dance I was first introduced to at middle school church camp. It is a dance full of marvelous contradictions: it is restrained yet spirited, connected yet independent, proper yet provocative. Perhaps I like it so much because its spirit epitomizes the ways I find myself daily moving through the world. If my personality could be a traditional folk dance, I know it would be the Highland Scottische.

But most importantly, it is a dance of many meetings and partings. You kick and clap and spin your way around the dance floor for as long as the band pleases. Never with the same partner. Not a bad thing when you have a less than ideal partner, but very hard when you meet someone with whom you delight in dancing. But as with life, there can be later meetings and other sets.

Perhaps it is odd that I think of a summer contra dance on Christmas Eve Day. I guess all the rain we’ve had in New Haven prompted my memory. But I also think that writing Christmas cards to friends and family the world over (while planning New Year’s visits in two different states) makes my heart feel like it is at an astral contra dance with those who are willing to connect their lives with mine. I’m glad that my heart is moving in this way. Like a good contra dance, friends, family, boyfriends, crushes, and lovers move in and out of my life. Some I will never see again, but others will return to me in surprising ways. And some, I will return to again and again, hoping that they will dance just one more set with me. And if they say yes, they are the ones that become my life-long partners, willing to move with me through it all.

But, the band stills plays and I still must say goodbye, looking ahead to my next partner, to my next life stage, steadied by the conviction of my two hands reaching out, opening my palms to the promise of new connections, hoping and trusting that whomever lets me rest my hands upon their palms, is worth the dance. And, that they will want to dance with me again.

One of my first Christmas gifts came earlier this week. After a lively lunch, a dear friend of mine handed me a long, cardboard tube.

“I had to give you your Christmas present today,” she said. “You’ll see why when you get home.”

And I did.

Rolled up inside the tube were six sheets of paper, lined with the images of colorful, gilded book bindings—lovely antique visions from the Bodleian Library’s Christmas Book Collection. My friend was right, she had to give me my Christmas present early. As a librarian with a deep partiality for exquisite, old books, how could I wrap my Christmas presents for family and friends in anything else?

I delightedly texted my friend, thanking her for her thoughtfulness. As I hit send, I reflected on just how wonderful a gift it was. Gifts can be rather singular and rather private in nature. A gift passes from you to a friend. If your friend likes it, or even if she does not, your gift will spend the rest of its existence inside your friend’s home, visible to only those your friend permits over her dwelling’s threshold. But that is not how wrapping paper works. It longs to know not just one of your friends, but all of them, as well as your family and co-workers. It wants to chat with others, rather loudly, about the nature of your friendship with the friend who gave you the paper in the first place. For each object that you wrap with the jolly print, becomes an introduction to your other friend when the receiver exclaims: “What lovely paper!” You can then reply: “Thank you, my friend Sally got it for me. She’s also a librarian. You really must meet someday, I think you two would get on well.”

The gift under the paper may be singular, but the wrapping paper wants to be everybody’s friend and happily wishes that everybody else also wants to be friends with each other. As I hope C.S. Lewis would quip, if he had written The Four Gifts rather than The FourLoves—wrapping paper is the least jealous of the gifts, always ready to extend its cheer and warmth to all.

What a fine way to introduce the wrapping paper giver to others I admire and love. And, what a fine way to start the Christmas season.

I have house guest this week. An old friend who will stay with me in my cozy apartment. That was the plan, until my housemates from downstairs needed someone to apartment sit for them.

It is the evening before my friend arrives and I am in my housemates’ apartment, making sure that the space is ready. I pull out sheets and towels and put away pots and dishes. In the process, I find one of my forks in the cutlery drawer, warmly welcomed into neat piles of silverware after some past exchange of cobbler or cake. I lay the fork on the kitchen table.

The only thing left for me to put away is a trio of white ceramic bowls, outward sloping and angular in shape. They are bowls I know well and deeply associate with my housemates. These bowls have contained all manner of things: ice cream eaten in solidarity when one of my housemates was pregnant, chili consumed in ecstatic joy as we gathered for house dinner, and soup, not consumed at all because a toddler’s pacifier floated in between the chicken chunks and spinach leaves.

I carefully place the bowls in the cupboard, pick up my fork from the kitchen table, and ascend the stairs to my apartment. Like my fork, I am going home from home. I wouldn’t want to welcome a house guest into any other space. For here, we regularly share our forks, our bowls, our households, and our lives.